- Thinking about a professor just before you take an intelligence test makes you perform better than if you think about football hooligans. Or does it? An influential theory that certain behavior can be modified by unconscious cues is under serious attack.
- A paper published in PLoS ONE last week reports that nine different experiments failed to replicate this example of ‘intelligence priming’ first described in 1998 by Ap Dijksterhuis, a social psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and now included in textbooks.
- David Shanks, a cognitive psychologist...and first author of the paper... is among skeptical scientists calling for Dijksterhuis to design a detailed experimental protocol to be carried out indifferent laboratories to pin down the effect.
- Dijksterhuis has rejected the request, saying that he “stands by the general effect” and blames the failure to replicate on “poor experiments”.
- Other high-profile social psychol...His claims include that people walk more slowly if they are primed with age-related words.
- Bargh, Dijksterhuis and their supporters argue that social-priming results are hard to replicate because the slightest change in conditions can affect the outcome. “There are moderators that we are unaware of,” says Dijksterhuis.
- But Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego — a long-time critic of social priming — notes that the effects reported in the original papers were huge. “If effects were that strong, it is unlikely they would abruptly disappear with subtle changes in procedure,” he says.
- Others remain concerned. [Daniel] Kahneman [a Nobel-prizewinning psychologist from Princeton University] wrote in the e-mail debate on 4 February that this “refusal to engage in a legitimate scientific conversation … invites the interpretation that the believers are afraid of the outcome”.
Find the full article here.
But but be sure to read a related piece in the New Yorker: The Crisis in Social Psychology That Isn't.
